Looking for a fun, light read to curl up with over these cold winter months? Look no farther than a cozy. Not only do cozies have murder, mystery, and a dash of humor, they oftentimes offer recipes, craft instruction and more. But as of late, we’re getting a little bit more in our cozies—a little…
Technology, and social media in particular, is interwoven into our daily lives in large and small ways we might not even think about anymore. Assuming you’re not reading this on your phone right now, you probably have your phone handy and I’d wager that you’ve checked at least one social media site today—and have probably…
A few years ago I bumped into the new Master of my old Oxford College (Oxford University is made up of 39 self-governing Colleges). He kindly offered to give me a tour of his home as I’d been developing a new novel set in an Oxford College, and I leaped at the chance to look…
Cryptography in seventeenth-century England was not just the stuff of spies and traitors, a fact that became a major plot point in The Sign of the Gallows, my fifth Lucy Campion historical mystery. While ciphers had grown more complex between the 16th and 17th centuries with the development of new mathematics, the actual practice of…
When Wednesday Books and I began to finesse the messaging that would frame the promotion of my new novel, The Project, “COURTNEY SUMMERS WILL DESTROY YOU” seemed like the most obvious choice. For over a decade, I’ve built a brand around my utter delight in emotionally traumatizing my readers with hard-hitting books about young women…
When I was a kid, two of my favorite TV shows were Barney Miller and Hill Street Blues. I was fascinated by them mainly because they were so much different from the other cop shows. On Barney Miller, they spent all their time in the squadroom dealing with ridiculously petty stuff for the most part,…
As a broke foster kid who never knew his parents, as a boy trained to be an expendable weapon, Evan is aware of what it feels like to be on the wrong end of a power dynamic. He knows it in his bones. And while he’s built himself into a person who has means, resources,…
It’s one of the oddest parts of being a novelist that your readers are more interested in what you do not tell them than what you do. Yes, the setting is delicious, the time-period intriguing, the action dynamic, the personalities gripping and surprising. You take a lot of trouble over your sentences and your paragraphs,…
Before I decided on a literary career at the age of forty I had been a failure. I was a film school reject directing stage plays in Germany and Austria for fourteen years, but there was not much money to be made in this line of business. I had also made a couple of shorts…
I’m that weirdo you occasionally see at an airport gate or in a waiting room; totally anomalous because I’m not a lonely planet orbiting around my digital sun. You can’t even see evidence of a digital sun on my person, which makes me rarer than a unicorn and appreciably suspicious. Of course, you might not…
